Quote Originally Posted by World's End Stella View Post
Yes, of course. But like all religions, Islam has bits we don't like in a modern, democratic, secular society and bits we do. The nutters do a pretty good job of highlighting the bits we don't so it strikes me as a pretty good idea that the more peaceful, modern members of our Muslim communities, who are in the overwhelming majority in this country, begin to emphasize the bits we do. Not doing so allows an unbalanced view of Islam to be consistently available in the media.

If there is a valid criticism of our Muslim communities it is how little of this they actually do. I expect partly because they feel they shouldn't have to and partly because of an ever present culture of victimization within their communities. But they need to man up and get over that, this is no time for being precious.
The problem they have is that any scrutiny of what the Quran actually says is going to be problematic for 'peaceful, modern muslims', since rather a lot of it isn't peaceful or modern.
One of the mistakes we make about Islam is thinking that the Quran is directly equivalent to the New Testament and thus all about the peace, love and understanding with just a couple of iffy bits. It really, really isn't. It's highly problematic in a lot of areas, which is why people prefer to gloss over it with the whole 'It's the religion of peace' nonsense and move on before anyone asks any tricky questions.
The fact is that on issues such as the place of women in society, attitudes towards non-muslims, blasphemy, apostasy, homosexuality and others, the Quran is actually pretty horrific.